Scott Momaday's and Dee Brown's descriptive essays of the Oklahoma plains clearly contain opposing views. This is evident in their different uses of tone and imagery. Momaday reveals his personal satisfaction with the hidden beauty in the land, while Brown means to curse the land by showing its desolation and lack of life.
Momaday and Brown use opposite tones in their passages to relay their attitudes to the audience. Momaday immediately establishes a personal connection in the first two sentences. He writes about a knoll that "rises out of the plain", and he "For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark". By saying "my people," he shows that he has a personal connection with these Plains. The line "rises out of the plain" brings life to the landscape, and a lively tone to Momaday's essay. In his concluding sentence, Momaday writes "your imagination comes to life... where Creation has begun". These phrases
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reiterate Momaday's tone that he establishes in the beginning of his essay- the land is alive. The last sentence leaves the essay on an uplifting note. On the contrary to Momaday, Brown's essay is immediately dark and sour in tone. In the first sentence, Brown writes "it seemed that everything had turned bad". Brown doesn't acknowledge even one living or beautiful aspect of the land. He continues the deathly tone by writing about "bones and skulls and rotting hooves". To Brown, there is not one thing that he finds worthwhile of a second glance on the entire Plains. At the end of his essay, he writes of the Indians not being able to survive on the Plains. Brown shows, again, how dead the land is, and leaves his essay with an unpleasant tone. Both Scott Momaday and Dee Brown use imagery, but their purposes with their imagery is completely opposite. Momaday writes of "green belts along river banks", "linear groves of hickory", and "North and West of the Witchita Range". These directional cues help the reader envision just how incrediblely vast the Plains are. He also talks about looking at the landscape in the early morning, and how it makes you loose your sense of proportion. He is saying that the Plains are so expansive that there is no shape or outline- they just continue miles beyond where the eye can see. On the contary, Brown wants to explain how the Plains have shrunk and become desolate. He writes at first of millions of buffalo roaming the Plains and then of "a few small herds." Brown shows how the Plains were once vast enough to accommodate many animals, not only buffalo. Now, he creates an image of a landscape that is smaller and dead. Momaday and Brown both describe the size of the Plains, but they see the Plains in two different ways. Both Native American authors write about the seasons and weather. Momaday describes hard weather: winters with blizzards, windy springs, and scorching summers. While Momaday does admit the weather is not pleasant all the time, he doesn't complain about it- he understands that it is part of life on the Plains. He also writes about "green belts along rivers and creeks". From his description of the hot summers, it is easy assume there is no greenery. Momaday makes sure to establish the fact that the landscape isn't completely dry and cracked, but that there is in fact vegetation and running water. Brown writes of the sun "baking the landscape" day after day. Brown doesn't even mention the other seasons, which are more pleasant than the summer. He focuses on the most drastic of the four season to create the the most negative possible image of the Plains. He also talks about how "the streams stopped running." Again, he is only writing about the summer when everything is dry- the streams are most likely running and lined with greenery in other seasons as Momaday wrote. By writing about only one season, Brown is only describing one aspect of the Plains. Momaday and Brown also write about animals and insects on the Plains, but in opposite ways.
Momaday writes about "great green and yellow grasshoppers... popping up like corn". His vivid description of the grasshoppers adds life and color to the landscape, and he also personifies their movement by saying how they pop out of the grass. Momaday also describes turtles that crawl "about the red earth, going nowhere in plenty of time". By talking about the turtle's slow pace, Momaday demonstrates the relaxed atmosphere of the Plains. Brown also writes of "great whirlwinds of grasshoppers were flung out of the metallic sky to consume the parched sky". His description of the grasshoppers is similar to the Bible story of the plagues of locusts in Egypt. The locusts in the Bible story consumed all the vegetation, leaving it dead and uninhabitable. Brown says that the grasshoppers on the Plains have also consumed the grass, leaving the Plains desolate and dead. In their essays, Momaday and Brown use similar descriptions to depict completely different
landscapes. Momaday and Brown both write descriptive, emotive essays about the Oklahoma Plains. Momaday's essay is passionate and describes a beautiful place, while on the contrast, Brown's essay depicts a land full of death and desolation. The two writers combine imagery and tone in similar ways to write starkly contrasting essays.
After reviewing Krakauer’s writing, we can see that he uses devices to connect to the reader. Whether it is providing epigrams or Krakauer’s own personal beliefs. He also proves to the reader that he shares the same ideology as McCandless making him a bit more creditable telling McCandless’ story. Then the reader can infer that McCandless believes that nature is a place of healing, and that it is his dream. As Krakauer demonstrating McCandless dreams, he gives us a chance to reflect on our own dreams.
West, Elliott, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, (University Press of Kansas,
A number of ideas, suggestions, and points can be extracted from “Illinois Bus Ride,” a passage from Aldo Leopold’s collection of essays entitled A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. However, there must be one main thesis that the author is attempting to get through to his audience. Leopold argues that we Americans have manipulated the landscape and ecosystem of the prairie so that it seems to be nothing more that a tool at our disposal. All aspects of what was once a beautiful, untamed frontier have been driven back further and further, until they were trapped in the ditches.
...sed in the first scene; the white family appear more superior over the aboriginal family, music, such as the Celtic music used in early scenes to foreground the idea of white settlement and the reluctantcy to incorporate any values or ways of life that the original inhabitants had. Her powerful dialogue seen in ‘this land is mine’ scene, which significantly empowers to audience to question whether the white settlers have failed to incorporate any of the ways of life and values of the Indigenous people. Finally, Perkins’ fine editing skills allows audiences to physically see the contrasts of the two families and their beliefs, values and ways of life. From the film, audiences can learn, and also forces them to question whether they have failed to learn from the original habitants of the land they live in today.
The setting of the essay is Los Angeles in the 1800’s during the Wild West era, and the protagonist of the story is the brave Don Antonio. One example of LA’s Wild West portrayal is that LA has “soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise” (Jackson 2). In the 1800’s, LA is not the same developed city as today. LA is an undeveloped land with impressive scenery that provides Wild West imagery. One characteristic of the Wild West is the sheer commotion and imagery of this is provided on “the first breaking out of hostilities between California and the United States, Don Antonio took command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to repel the intruders” (15). This sheer commotion is one of methods of Wild West imagery Jackson
Born in Home, Pennsylvania in 1927, Abbey worked as a forest ranger and fire look-out for the National Forest Service after graduating from the University of New Mexico. An author of numerous essays and novels, he died in 1989 leaving behind a legacy of popular environmental literature. His credibility as a forest ranger, fire look- out, and graduate of the University of New Mexico lend credibility to his knowledge of America’s wilderness and deserts. Readers develop the sense that Abbey has invested both time and emotion in the vast deserts of America.
Herbert Otto, an esteemed author, once wrote, “Change and growth take place when a person has risked themselves and dares to become involved in experimenting with their own life” (Wilderdom: A Project in Natural Living & Transformation). Essentially, Otto is saying that in order to grow as a person and become educated, one must break free from what bring him or her comfort, which allows him or her to be daring and adventurous. Christopher McCandless holds a similar view point on education and experimentation or adventure, which can be seen in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. McCandless believes that once people find a way to break free from the default and comfortable setting that so many of us function on, are we able to discover our adventurous
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
Reminiscing is almost like a hobby for people, to be lost within another world of nostalgia and simplicity is something we all yearn for as we grow up. We miss those days of less and full understanding, of active and worn out adventures of children, of anxious anticipation of a the flat lands. Debra Marquart in her 2006 memoir “The Horizontal World” illustrates those memories in a hint of nostalgia. Through the use of imagery, allusions, and satirical yet nostalgic tone Marquart’s memoir demonstrates a lucid dream of North Dakota as an area of no interest that yet emboldens an American ideal of the Jeffersonian farming could occur for those who are willing to take up the offer.
When looking at the vast lands of Texas after the Civil War, many different people came to the lands in search for new opportunities and new wealth. Many were lured by the large area that Texas occupied for they wanted to become ranchers and cattle herders, of which there was great need for due to the large population of cows and horses. In this essay there are three different people with three different goals in the adventures on the frontier lands of Texas in its earliest days. Here we have a woman's story as she travels from Austin to Fort Davis as we see the first impressions of West Texas. Secondly, there is a very young African American who is trying his hand at being a horse rancher, which he learned from his father. Lastly we have a Mexican cowboy who tries to fight his way at being a ranch hand of a large ranching outfit.
Smith’s and Bradford’s individual descriptions are simply two categories; fiction and nonfiction. Smith’s intention for his audience is that the new land is everything you can wish for without a single fight. Smith starts by describing the content and pleasure that risking your life for getting your own piece of land brings to people. He is luring his audience in by telling that it is a wonderful world of vast food and gratification. Smith wants his audience to be more of the joyful individuals who look for the good in everyt...
Many parallels can be drawn between the works of W.E.B. DuBois and those of James Weldon Johnson. Johnson was greatly influenced by many concepts created by DuBois, especially those presented in DuBois's classic work The Souls of Black Folk. Johnson was so impressed with DuBois and his ideas that he sought him out in 1904 at Atlanta University. The two men developed a strong friendship and later worked for years together in the NAACP, Johnson's diplomatic temperment often balancing DuBois's more volitile one.*
One of his intriguing skills as a writer is his ability to intertwine narration and analysis in his essays. James Baldwin mixes narration and analysis in his essays so well that coherence is never broken, and the subconscious is so tempted to agree with and relate to what he says, that if you don’t pay close attention, one will find himself agreeing with Baldwin, when he wasn’t even aware Baldwin was making a point. Physical placement of analytical arguments and analytical transitions, frequency and size of analytical arguments, and the language used within the analytical arguments are the keys to Baldwin’s graceful persuasion. Throughout this essay, I will be using Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” as an example. “Notes of a Native Son” is an essay that Baldwin wrote which focuses primarily on his life around the time his father died, which also happens to be the same time his youngest brother was born.
The structure of how Momaday is interesting. He splits the book into three sections: The Setting Out, The Going On, and The Closing in. I cannot tell much difference between the sections besides progression throughout history. For Example, in ‘The Setting’ out they start with a creation story. He has three different voices in each of these sections: one that’s mythological, one historical, and one personal. Another aspect of the book that caught my attention was the occasional picture that Al Momaday illustrates. They are simple, one subject, black and white pictures. Do they mean to bring emphasis on the corresponding story or just add another visual element to the text? Only the illustration on page 63 features a man. The man looks to be attacking a buffalo. The other pictures are mai...
All in all, the treatment of the American Indian during the expansion westward was cruel and harsh. Thus, A Century of Dishonor conveys the truth about the frontier more so than the frontier thesis. Additionally, the common beliefs about the old west are founded in lies and deception. The despair that comes with knowing that people will continue to believe in these false ideas is epitomized by Terrell’s statement, “Perhaps nothing will ever penetrate the haze of puerile romance with which writers unfaithful to their profession and to themselves have surrounded the westerner who made a living in the saddle” (Terrell 182).